556. The US-China AI Arms Race and Badenoch vs. Rory’s Centrism

Is China quietly outsmarting the US in the AI arms race, and is Trump laying the pitch to challenge the results of the US midterms with his repeated, unfounded claims of Chinese election meddling? Why has Zelenskyy sacked his popular defence minister just as Ukraine is winning on the battlefield? Does Kemi Badenoch’s purge of Rory-adjacent centrists from the Conservative Party show she is even more ruthless than Margaret Thatcher? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Summer sale is here: get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Adam Thornton, Caroline Kaye Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  Three months ago, the defining story in artificial intelligence was the race between China and the US, with China seeming to be a long way behind. And yet today, China is unveiling AI systems that are strikingly close to the US frontier, while Xi Jinping launches a new international AI organisation and invites the developing world to join it. So what exactly are we looking at? Is China genuinely catching America technologically? Or has it become extraordinarily good at taking American breakthroughs, building on them and making them cheaper, open and more accessible? And is this summit really about

• 0:44Rory Stewart?

  artificial intelligence at all? Or is it something much bigger about soft as well as hard power? A Belt and Road initiative for AI, an attempt to make Chinese technology, Chinese standards, Chinese institutions, the default digital infrastructure for the global south. Because if that's right, then the real competition, both in AI and in geopolitics, may no longer be over who builds the single smartest model. It may be over who shapes the technological order that the rest of the world ends up living in.

• 1:21Rory Stewart?

  This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 1:24Alastair Campbell?

  Right now Fuse Energy's tariffs are up to £200 below the offgem price cap. Plus, they've just launched a new referral offer that can bring your bill down even further.

• 1:34Rory Stewart?

  What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about Fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get £50 towards your next bill.

• 1:45Alastair Campbell?

  So it starts with one conversation. No prize draws, no chance, no complicated reward scheme, just the power of one smart recommendation that rewards you both.

• 1:56Rory Stewart?

  And remember, energy prices are more volatile than ever, but don't wait for rates to spike again. Switch to Fuse in just three minutes and move to cheaper energy designed to help you and your friends cut bills.

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  So don't just listen to another price cap story. Switch to Fuse, save up to £200 and get a trip plus free with code POLITICS at fuseenergy.com/politics.

• 2:24Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:26Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my grand European tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 2:39Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview, the first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old, the tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom, big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 4:03Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. So Rory, China and AI. Daniel, what does China's new AI organisation reveal about its ambitions in artificial intelligency and its rivalry with the United States, which is kind of what you addressed in the introduction? First of all, you know, help me on how we pronounce this. Waco, Waco? World Artificial Intelligence Corporation Organisation?

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So two big bits of news. And of course, the Chinese have very cleverly coincided the two things together. So first big bit of news, the launch of something called Kimi K3, which is a new Chinese frontier large language model. If you were to look at it on your phone, it essentially looks a bit like ChatGPT or DeepSeek or Gemini, but it's a remarkable breakthrough from the Chinese, which I can come to in a bit, because on certain indicators, it's doing as well as or even better than the American models, China having traditionally been seen as being, you know, nine months behind.

• 5:12Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, just on that, how much of that has been down to their famed industrial espionage tactics?

• 5:18Rory Stewart?

  Certainly, a lot of it seems to be to do with them learning from the American models, reverse engineering them and building systems which are, if not outright theft, at least copying a lot of the innovation. But it's very interesting because what's happening is that America is spending 27 times as much in terms of private investment on AI, and about seven and a half times as much if you look at the hyperscalist investments. So hyperscale is probably going to put in about 700 billion when China's going to put in about 100 billion. And yet China is developing things which are almost as good as the American models now. So there's something really interesting. You put in 27 times more investment

• 6:03Rory Stewart?

  and you're just a couple of percent ahead. And why is that? Well, almost certainly because there's a real advantage to being a follower rather than the first mover, because you can learn all the stuff, you can work out what the benchmarks are. And in the case of Kimi K3, where they've really astonished people is in coding. And they're right up there with the top models from OpenAI and from Anthropic, with ChatGPT and with Fable 5 on the coding, which has really shaken people to the core. Because America has been telling, when I was going to these gristy conferences in the US three years ago, the story was that they were comfortable two years ahead of China. It would always take

• 6:45Rory Stewart?

  China two years to catch up. By the launch of DeepSeek, they were beginning to worry that China was six to nine months behind, but they were always a model behind. With this launch, it looks like the Chinese on some indicators are better than a lot of the American models and just behind the frontier of Anthropic and OpenAI.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned the issue of soft power. And of course, America's soft power has been damaged by quite a lot of the things that Trump has said and done in his second term. But it's also becoming just part of the general US-China rivalry. So this new organisation, should we call it Waco? Let's call it Waco.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  Let's call it that. That sounds a bit like some mad American far-right attack, doesn't it?

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  Texas town, isn't it? Wasn't there lots of bad things happening there? Yeah. Okay, Waeco, Waeco. We'll call it Waeco. So they've now got 29 countries signed up to it. And Washington has this A1 opportunity statement with 35 countries. But what the Chinese seem to be saying is that we're going to, whereas the Americans are seeing this very much as sort of, you know, zero-sum game, we're going to dominate, we're saying, come in, learn from us, take our training. So I think it is part of their broader soft power gambit. If you look at where they're going, Latin America, ASEAN, Africa.

• 8:04Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. So the American, core American offer is something called the Pax Silica.

• 8:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:11Rory Stewart?

  So apart from this AI initiative, Pax Silica was an American attempt to try to integrate supply chains. Then it got Japan, South Korea, UK and some others signed up, including Qatar, UAE. But the Pax Silica, the American version, is very, very low on any commitments or any institutional framing. Essentially, it's saying, the great word that America keeps using is, America will endeavour to share its products. And the killer blow to Pax Silica happened when America held back the frontier models and didn't allow non-US citizens to use them. And I don't think we've fully taken on board

• 8:53Rory Stewart?

  what that meant. Because of course, it was very, very worrying for companies in Europe, the economy in Europe, if suddenly it turns out that we can't get the latest American models that we're building all our systems around. But it's even more worrying if you are GCHQ and Cheltenham are signals intelligence people who are relying on having these frontier models in order to deal with cyber attacks. And suddenly, British banks, British intelligence security organisations, the US was no longer sharing the frontier technology with us. And the Pax Silica then began to seem remarkably empty because there were no guarantees, no institutions you could follow through on. Contrast China. Waeco is much more institutional.

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  It has a secretariat, it has a headquarters in Shanghai. Guterres, the UN Secretary General, has been involved. They have formal relationships with organizations like the African Union, the Arab League, ASEAN, BRICS. And what China is saying is firstly, our models are open weights. So if you buy a Chinese model at the moment, you get to have all the weights yourselves. That that means that you essentially get key bits of the code. And if you have the chips and the data centers, you can host and tinker the Chinese model and it's yours. The Chinese can't take it back. The American model is completely different. The American model is that the technology remains in the US, they license it to you.

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  And as Trump demonstrated, effectively, they have a kill switch. They can switch it off whenever they want. So there's something much more appealing about an open weight model, which you control and you can build on. And somebody can't kill switch secondarily. The Chinese models are much cheaper.

• 10:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  You know, less clear on the latest Chinese model, but on the deep-seak models, you're looking at them doing things for a few cents that are costing nearly a hundred times more per unit to run. So if you're the Nigerian Health Ministry or the Indonesian Education Ministry, it's much cheaper to run off Chinese models. You can make it much more suitable for your own local language or your own suitable for your own local databases. And the Chinese will then follow up with technical training, with loans, with infrastructure, with investments. So effectively, this is a story about China not just making huge technological advances, but being much more thoughtful than the US in terms of how to create a system

• 11:18Rory Stewart?

  that people might want to actually buy into.

• 11:21Alastair Campbell?

  I told you recently, I was talking to, when I was in Hong Kong, talking to Kevin Rudd, who's, you know, a genuine China expert and has written this extraordinary book analyzing Xi Jinping's speeches down the years. And the one thing I found reading that book was just how quite dry and technocratic Xi can be. But his speech on AI was sort of, for him, extraordinary kind of lyrical. He said, "This is a major move by China to answer the call of the global south and unite the international community together. We often say in China, a single string cannot make music, a single tree does not make a forest. AI should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation."

• 12:06Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, that struck me as being a kind of direct, that's your way, Trump, this is my way, and we're going to be getting far more people involved internationally. It is a Belt and Road initiative of AI.

• 12:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and it's happening at a time when the Chinese economy, we shouldn't underestimate this, is facing really big, serious problems, right? I mean, the property sector is still a catastrophe. It's 30% of Chinese GDP. And it's not just houses, it underwrites the banking system, it's basically people's pensions, savings, they're underwater. There's a lot of youth unemployment. It's aging, so the population will shrink by about 200 million over the next 30 years. So China has some problems, but they have made these incredibly smart technology bets. They're still the greatest manufacturer and exporter in the world, and their export figures are very impressive. They're struggling to get Chinese consumers to spend.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  Still a big, big problem. They're going to face challenges if Europe starts putting up tariffs. And, you know, we haven't talked enough about Volkswagen laying off 150,000 to 200,000 workers. I mean, extraordinary, the changes that are coming, largely because of Chinese competition to European industry and where that goes. But what they're showing with AI is that even if their economy slows, they are still going to be the most formidable technology and defense player. And they're making the most of it. And whereas Trump is taking a country with so much potential and making it less than it could be by shattering his alliances around the world. China is playing a relatively weak hand.

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  It's not as if anybody wants to sign up to the Chinese system of government. Very few people want to move to China and live there. Their AI models are not as good as the US models that frontier at least haven't been until recently. But with Waco, they're showing exactly how very thoughtful international cooperation can compensate for a lot of weakness.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  Let's use the picture caption of the week as a bridge to Samantha's question about whether China did interfere in the US election. I thought that the best caption of the week, Rory, was in The Guardian, a picture of Infantino with Trump next to the Spanish World Cup winning team, which said, "Gianno Infantino gently attempting to persuade Donald Trump that he is not part of the Spanish World Cup winning football team", as he just would look, get out of the picture. Now, what do we make of it? So Trump is back on election denial, election meddling. And remarkably, given that we know how hard the Russians try to interfere in elections, not least theirs,

• 14:50Alastair Campbell?

  not a mention of Russia, but it's all about China. China, he says, accessed 220 million voter records. And this comes as he's trying to get the Save Act through Congress, which would make it harder for an awful lot of people to vote. So Rory, you as our China expert, did China interfere in the US election? Or were they trying to stop Donald Trump become president?

• 15:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't think there's any evidence of that. I think it's very plausible that they've accessed the voter records. Never underestimate Chinese cyber attacks or the amount of information they're hoovering up all the time.

• 15:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:29Rory Stewart?

  I'm a bit doubtful about whether actually they get much advantage from getting voter records. I mean, you know, imagine what those voter records are. You get registration sheets, you and I have campaigned in streets. You get people's names, addresses. What do you do with that that China hasn't already got through 10,000 other forms of interference? The kinds of Chinese cyber attacks and interference that you want to worry about are much more about critical infrastructure and industrial secrets, I think. And certainly, I don't think that Trump is to be relied upon in trying to provide some theory on Chinese interference in elections. And I would have thought that from the Chinese point of view, Trump becoming president is the greatest gift they've ever received, and it's a gift that keeps on giving.

• 16:11Rory Stewart?

  I mean, nothing has consolidated China's position as it tries to position itself as a kind of predictable, reliable partner in the world than the catastrophe of Trump. So if they were interfering in elections at all, I think they would have been trying to get Trump elected.

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  But isn't it incredible how, so this thing about, you know, I was robbed of the election, Joe Biden didn't win, I didn't win. And he's never, ever, ever acknowledged the lack of veracity to that statement. He's never even sort of hinted that, yeah, maybe, but. And but what he's done, and this is what we're talking to, when you were in your retreat at Medhi House Amazon, he was saying that when the Trump denialism started, he made a decision that they would not interview any Republicans unless they admitted that Joe Biden won the election. Okay. They had to scrap it because they couldn't get any Republicans to talk to. And you even have judges sitting in hearings where they're trying to become a judge,

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  refusing to say that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. But the way that he just keeps going with it, and of course, what this is partly about is so that if and when he does very, very badly in the midterms, he wants to be able to say, China was involved in this, the vote rigging was going on, all these dead voters, all these. And when you look at the stats, well, you know, we have problems here. Every democracy has problems in being as functional as it wants to be. But this thing about, you know, you have to have either a passport or a birth certificate, something that proves who you are to vote. Even today, Rory, 51% of Americans do not have a valid passport. 69 million American women do not have a birth certificate that matches their current legal name.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, 24% of Americans under 30 or 30 who are eligible to vote do not have access to the documents that are needed under this act. And of course, this particularly disproportionately affects immigrant population, black population, et cetera, low incomes. It's very, very deliberate.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  Very deliberate attempt to try to get them out. Now, because this is question time and a more jolly showdown, I think, I just want to introduce the thing that's making a noise in the background to the audience if people are watching on video. But you can describe it if people on audio, and then I'm going to release it.

• 18:31Alastair Campbell?

  What the hell is going on now? Oh, it's an animal.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  So this is Jehan.

• 18:37Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 18:38Rory Stewart?

  Jehan is a, is um, Ivo's possession, is a Jehan is a herman tortoise. He's a little nervous at the moment because he's being held off the ground. You can see his head coming out as he's saying hello to you.

• 18:50Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, what does that mean when the head comes out?

• 18:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, it means that they're less nervous than they were.

• 18:54Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Tortoise with me, Alice Campbell. And what's the noise he's making? Because I, I can't hear anything.

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  Oh, you didn't hear. So he was, he was tapping against the, the, the nesting box that he, he lives in.

• 19:06Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  To come out and come for a walk. And he travels at quite a pace. He'll, you, you know this dining room. He'll make it round the dining room.

• 19:12Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Quite a pace.

• 19:13Rory Stewart?

  We keep hoping that he may outlive us all yet. I mean, they are wonderful in there. And they're, they're one of these animals that, I know we're not doing the rest of nature, but.

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  We should.

• 19:24Rory Stewart?

  They're some kind of animals that look prehistoric. Um, and turn out to be prehistoric. I also sort of feel there's certain kinds of fish, certain kinds of crab, tortoises, some kinds of lizards that you look at and you think this thing looks very, very, very ancient. And generally it turns out they are. These things were genuinely around before the dinosaurs.

• 19:45Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  And I feel that, did you, did you like snorkeling? Do you like snorkeling? I, I, I love it. That sort of sense that you're sort of hanging around in the water, looking at these sort of prehistoric life forms.

• 19:55Alastair Campbell?

  But do you go down with, with oxygen and stay deep?

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  I've done a little bit of that, but generally I just float around with a little, little snorkel.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  If you read that book, I, I, did you read Nord Stream Conspiracy? Because the most terrifying thing is the description of what it's like when you're diving.

• 20:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And the fact that, well, anyone who hasn't read it, I mean, it's the most incredible book. But one of the things I think that you pointed out from it is that the Ukrainians had to recruit people who could dive much deeper even than their special forces divers in order to get to this pipeline and blow it up.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  I know. Incredible.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  Who practiced in what abandoned quarries in Ukraine?

• 20:29Alastair Campbell?

  Just before this, can we, can we, as we're having a wildlife moment?

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  I hope we put in the newsletter. I, I had the most wonderful experience in Iceland where I just went, I was looking at these Arctic terns. And one of them came by and it was, it was like she was on a treadmill just for my pleasure. She was like, she was not flying forward. She was just doing the motions. And it was, it was the best moment of the year so far. Obviously, apart from Scotland beating Haiti.

• 20:57Rory Stewart?

  How wonderful. So she was sort of floating over, she was sort of.

• 21:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it was like just treadmill flying. It was beautiful. Yeah. Anyway, let's get on to Ukraine.

• 21:05Rory Stewart?

  How lovely. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay. Yeah. So the, the segue is from the Nord Stream where it now turns out the Ukrainians did indeed blow up this massive Russian gas pipeline to Germany. But a question from Chloe, which is why did Zelensky just fire his defence minister? Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about Mikhail Fedorov, who must have been in when you were there visiting.

• 21:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And who is, is a very, very popular figure in, in Ukraine. And as Chloe rightly says, Zelensky, who is also, for somebody who's been in power so long, pretty popular still. Very, you know, on the one hand, not having to have elections because you're banned by their law from having elections if you're at war is an advantage to him in that there's no sort of immediate threat for him to get kicked out of office. But on the other hand, it's, I think, sometimes harder to maintain authority in a democracy. If you don't at least have a sense that you're being tested and challenged. I think Fedorov would have been maybe somebody, he's certainly seen that he's young.

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  You know, mid thirties, which for, you know, that level of politician in that part of Europe is pretty young. Seen as incredibly energetic. He, he's one of the people who's been part of this development of Ukraine as, I mean, you talk to military people, I do, they say what Ukraine's done in terms of adapting to the changed circumstances, particularly drone warfare is, and he gets a lot of credit for that. But the rea, the answer to Chloe's question is it's come down to a straightforward, old fashioned power struggle between the minister and the commander in chief, this guy, Oleksandr Sierski. Um, and Sierski has won. It's as simple as that. And Zelensky, Zelensky is pretty much admitting that. He basically said, I would like to have kept them both.

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  But in the end I had to make a choice because these two guys were. And I don't, I can't really get to the bottom of whether it's personal or whether there's something about the difference in strategy that both of them have wanted to pursue. And these relations are always quite tricky. I mean, you, we were very lucky back in the day with a series of, well, actually, no, we had some pretty strained relations as well, but we had at, at difficult times, we had pretty good relations with the, with the, with the military. And if you, if you have the milit, the, the head of the armed forces who's there thinking, you know, rightly to some extent, I know much about how the military work. I know much more about war than you do. And you have some guy comes in and says, I want to shake this and shake that up. It seems to me that that relationship has broken down.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  And Zelensky's had to make this choice and he's, and he's, he's chosen to go with the, uh, with the generals.

• 23:41Rory Stewart?

  Couple of things. One thing is that, um, I'm not sure that we've fully taken on how unbelievable what Ukraine's managed to do is. I mean, if you go back to Trump taking over. Trump taking over was the introduction of a very, very pro Putin, anti Ukraine policy from the White House. Putting huge pressure on Ukraine essentially to give up and settle. Disarm, get rid of a lot of its military. Accept Russian de facto control, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then the US followed up by stopping all its funding. Drew fifty billion dollars a year of funding to Ukraine.

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  At times turned off satellites, uh, didn't deliver on missiles which Ukraine had been promised, including Patriot missile defence systems. And the US, of course, has been firing Patriots like Billy O out in the Gulf in its Iran war. All of that meant that if you were J D Vance, you thought that Ukraine was going to be forced to come to a deal with Russia because they completely depended on the US.

• 24:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Rory Stewart?

  The story actually has turned out to be very different. We now have these long range Ukrainian strikes against vital bits of Russian infrastructure. So these clouds of smoke going up from Russian refineries. Around Crimea, the Sea of Azov seems to have been almost closed by Ukrainian attacks so that the Crimean garrison of the Russians is in real trouble. And a lot of this presumably or some of this, Fedorov, the, the, uh, Defence Minister should have been able to take credit for. I mean, it's, um, it's a slightly odd thing. I mean, we've had it twice now from Zelensky. Zaluzhny, who's now the ambassador in Britain, was doing an amazing job. And was removed. And now he's removed someone else doing an amazing job.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  I think with Zaluzhny.

• 25:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  It was part, I think that there was a real sense that Zaluzhny was seen as possibly taking over from Zelensky at a time when Zelensky didn't want that talk. That was something that I kept hearing when I was, when I was out in, in Ukraine. Um, Fedorov has been very, very clear that in his view, uh, Sierski was doing a bit of divide and rule. He, he actually said at his press conference, instead of thinking about how we defeat Russia, he figured out how to split our own country.

• 25:58Rory Stewart?

  And sorry, just, just quickly, the story that I've heard, and maybe this is nonsense, is that there is actually a big tactical disagreement between Sierski, that the general and Fedorov, the Defence Minister, which is that Fedorov was all about drones, that's probably very simple, but drones, A I, devolve local commanders, let them run these almost autonomous things forward. And Sierski was still trying to run quite an old fashioned centrally command military infantry first, drone and support.

• 26:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  So very, very weird to remove the man who seems to be doing the more radical, relevant contemporary tactics and leave in place the guy who represented the more old fashioned side of Ukrainian fighting.

• 26:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But I think this is what's so interesting about Ukraine is that we see it. And even yesterday, talking to the Prime Minister in Iceland, she was saying that, you know, it's a long, long way away, but we don't even have an army, but people in Iceland really feel that Ukraine is, you know, fighting for all of us and something was so special about them. And that is a kind of outside image that a lot of countries have. When you, it's interesting when you go there, how quickly you pick up on some of these political tensions and political divides. And that's an obvious one for the military, isn't it? Because you, you have a military that's, that sees itself as the professional military. And then in some comes some guy from outside who sort of says, we need to do this. And he's on the phone to Elon Musk trying to sort out Starlink and

• 27:27Alastair Campbell?

  you know, it's just very, very different world. And I think what Zelensky's on this one has decided, I've got to stay a little bit closer to the old world, otherwise I'm going to be under pressure. And the other thing he got rid of, one of the other people I met when I was out there was the Prime Minister. Uh, Yulia Sia Videnko, and she's been sacked as well. Well, she was offered a different job. He asked her to be ambassador in Washington. She refused. So we've now got a, a new Prime Minister. So the tensions are there at a time when Ukraine actually militarily seems to be doing pretty well.

• 28:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just finally, and not to be uncharitable to your, your mate Zelensky. Is it not possible that actually quite a lot of this is about power politicking and these people being potential rivals that that if you were being uncharitable, you'd say this isn't really just about resolving a fight with the general. It's about the fact that Fedorov was becoming too popular and a bit like Zaluzhny. Uh, he's moving him aside because he's a direct challenge to his authority. And in fact, ironically, what seems to be happening with Zelensky repeatedly is he moves these people aside and they become even more popular.

• 28:34Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. But then the other thing that seems to be given is whether if, when hopefully this war does end and there will be an election, that you, that Zelensky will, you know, will probably move on. Um, that's a kind of the sense you get. Now, lots of people, when they're in power, they don't want to leave power. Um, so listen, there's no doubt, certainly about Zaluzhny, people say that openly. They will say to you, look, you know, he was getting too big for his boots. He was getting too popular. Ship him off to London, quite an important job. He stayed close to the Brits, et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, it just shows that even when you're at war and perceived to be doing pretty well, politics will always have a way of coming back and making life difficult.

• 29:15Alastair Campbell?

  Apologies to only be confused by suddenly we're in a different place at a different time, but we recorded on Tuesday, it's now Wednesday, and since when there has been a major development, which is under the threat of enormous and continuing protests about the sacking of Fedorov, the Defence Minister, he has now, Zelensky has now sacked the commander that we were talking about, Sieski, and has basically admitted that this is because he wanted to be able to get the two working together, they couldn't, he sacked one of them, and the public has been in revolt about that, so he's now sacked both, and we are yet to see who for the long term is going to replace them.

• 29:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's brought in at the moment a man called Mikhail Drapati, who's only 43, so nearly 15, 20 years younger than the outgoing general, who's a real kind of, I guess, a battle-hardened general. So that's very interesting. And Fedorov, as you say, at the moment has been replaced by someone called Yevheny Kumara, a former top official at the SBU, which is their equivalent of the MI6 or KGB. And the question remains, how much of this is about disagreements, how much this is about military tactics, and how much this is about personalities and political jockeying on the ground in Ukraine? But it's not great, to be honest. I mean, Ukraine, you know, let's be brutal about this, Ukraine over the last few months

• 30:39Rory Stewart?

  has got itself in a much stronger position. They've gone from the defensive on to the offensive. The Russians are seriously worried. It doesn't look good to me to be removing your top general and your Defence Minister when you're on a roll and you're winning. And I think that raises some questions about about Zelensky's judgment.

• 30:58Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, there you go, Chloe. We weren't ignorant, it's just that we were speaking before the events that have since taken place. Okay, Rory, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll talk about how Kemi Badenoch is handling your beloved party slash forward party, whatever we call it these days.

• 31:17Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. Look forward to it.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Nordstrom Rack is celebrating 125 years of Nordstrom with 125 of the best deals up to 65% off in stores and online. We're talking incredible savings on brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Rag & Bone, All Saints and more. They're only here while supplies last. So shop today. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favourite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty crunchy peanuts, sweet sweet caramel, wrapping you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Riss Report. It's question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 32:12Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 32:13Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, this is definitely for you. Cameron, Rory, what do you think about the purge of the Tory wets, by which I think they mean particularly recently Theresa May's former Chief of Staff, former Housing Minister Gavin Barwell?

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  First thing, just put my cards on the table, Gavin Barwell's a friend of mine. And this general tendency to move against this group is moving against my group in Parliament. So this comes on the back of an attack by Kemi Badenoch, also on David Gork, my great hero who'd been in the Secretary of State for Justice, because he'd got a knighthood for running a review of justice for Keir Starmer. She has decided to portray those of us who were, I guess we would have been called under Margaret Thatcher Tory wets, or if you're an American listener, we would have been, you know, Mitt Romney

• 33:05Rory Stewart?

  Republicans, maybe. She's decided that we need to be evicted from the party. And she's setting more and more loyalty tests and narrowing the bandwidth of who a Conservative can be. So, I mean, obviously, look, I'm going to criticise this and I'm going to be difficult about it. But let me explain firstly what she's doing, and then maybe we can get into the rights and wrongs of it, and whether there's a logic behind it. The fundamental thing she's doing is she's saying that you can only run to be a Tory candidate in the next election if you sign up to two things. One of them is rejecting net zero.

• 33:45Alastair Campbell?

  Oh damn, I won't be able to stand, Rory. That's me out. I can't stand as a Tory MP, no.

• 33:50Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And the second thing is you'd have to reject the European Convention on Human Rights. Now, just to explain why this is so extraordinary, it's so extraordinary because it was we, the Conservative government, who introduced this net zero legislation. And I, as a Tory, was to be found on my hind legs, giving one hour defences of the European Convention on Human Rights against Jacob Rees-Mogg in the House of Commons. And there's a couple of things you take from that. One is, she is actually saying that people who sign up to what was our government policy, and we all voted for it, right, any MP in the House

• 34:31Rory Stewart?

  of Commons, who was there before, you know, 2019, would have voted for this net zero and actually right the way through to 2024 would have supported that policy, because it was all part of our policy. So by definition, she is asking her existing MPs to change their conscience, to say, I voted for something, I believed in something, and now in order to remain as a Conservative MP, I have to reject what I once voted for and supported. But the second thing that that ECHR story of me having an hour-long debate with Jacob Rees-Mogg shows, is that the whole point of British politics is that these parties were broad coalitions. And so it was possible for Jacob Rees-Mogg and me to be in the same party, and it was possible for us literally to sit in the House of Commons debating each

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  other for an hour, with me in favour of the European Convention on Human Rights and him against the European Convention on Human Rights, but neither he nor I would have been thrown out of the party. And the most dramatic example of that was Brexit. You know, David Cameron did not say, I mean, the Prime Minister was in favour of Remain, most of the MPs were in favour of Remain, but the Prime Minister did not say to our MPs, unless you favour Remain, you're going to be thrown out of the Conservative Party. He allowed, you know, 40% of the members of Parliament to be Brexiteers, 60% to be Remain, and that remained the case, right? And why is that necessary? It's necessary because the whipping system, which Andy Burnham is so angry about, and I'm so angry about, if you're not careful, creates a sort of

• 35:57Rory Stewart?

  electoral dictatorship in which the Prime Minister can simply use the whips to drive through his agenda. It's not like the US Senate or the Congress, where the senators and Congress people, at least until Trump, were relatively independent of the President, and there was a balance and there was a check of power. Members of Parliament are so vulnerable already to a Prime Minister, because he gives them their jobs, you know, a third of them end up on the payroll, they're whipped all the time, they're punished all the time. The one hope for any discussion, dissent, is to accept that these parties are coalitions where people can have different views. That began going wrong with Boris Johnson, who of course kicked 21 of us out of the Conservative Party, because we tried to ask for more time

• 36:41Rory Stewart?

  to debate the European Union legislation. But it then went wrong with Keir Starmer, who started kicking out the previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, because of Jeremy Corbyn's views on Palestine. So this is really worrying. And I think Kemi Badenoch, it's bad for the Conservative Party, I think it's bad policy, it's bad for the consciences of the MPs who signed up sincerely, one hopes, to views that they're now being asked to publicly reject. It's like a Stalinist show trial, in which four years ago, you were expected to champion one thing and say one thing, and then in some Animal Farm situation, you're now supposed to say exactly the opposite, or you're for the chop. But it's also very bad for British democracy, because we need different voices in the House of Commons

• 37:26Rory Stewart?

  within parties to have any form of accountability or debate at all.

• 37:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I've been reading an advanced copy of Johnny Mercer, his book, who we're going to have on leading soon, because he's written about his career. And actually, there's a lot of similarities with you in terms of his assessment of what Parliament and government is like, and this sense of-

• 37:48Rory Stewart?

  And I suspect Andy Burnham too.

• 37:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Andy Burnham is openly saying that this is partly what drove him out of Parliament. Of course, he's now gone back and says he's going to change that. Just on the broader political judgment, though, I've thought from the word go that whoever takes over from your last load of leaders, had to regain some sense of the Conservatives being a party that could appeal to a broad network of people, as it's always done historically. Whereas what it's done, I mean, Andy Burnham said when he took over, we're not going to win back Greens by out greening the Greens, and we're not going to win back Reform voters by out reforming Reform. And I think that the, put the Greens to one side for a minute,

• 38:35Alastair Campbell?

  but in terms of Reform, that's the message for Kemi Badenoch as well. This is so clearly about trying to say to Reform voters, because she keeps reading the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, that they're all up in arms about the ECHR, because it's got the word European in it, and Farage keeps banging on about it. That's not the way she's going to win these people back. She's going to win these people back if she can sow the Conservative Party to be serious, particularly about the economy, to have learnt the lessons from the past, and to have a policy agenda for the future. Not some kind of, as you say, some sort of ideological purge test that most of them, if they were being honest with themselves, would fail.

• 39:09Rory Stewart?

  It's so weird, isn't it? Because it's all very well turning against someone like me, because I wasn't, you know, an old party hand, and it's perfectly legitimate to say I was a Johnny come lately and, you know, wasn't a proper blue-blood Tory, maybe because I'd been in the civil service, I'd been abroad and I came back. Whereas Gavin Barwell, who she's just thrown out, is absolutely at the core of it. When I first- Was standing as a candidate. He was right there in Conservative Party head office, running the candidates list, organised. He's a real, proper party person. He ran very, very effective campaigns in a marginal seat in Croydon. He, as you say, was Theresa May's Chief of Staff

• 39:53Rory Stewart?

  and chosen as the Chief of Staff because he was one of the most liked, popular, central figures amongst the Members of Parliament. I mean, he was a really trusted, true blue Conservative. It's a very, very weird move to make. I mean, I don't know who the Labour equivalent to someone like that would be, but it's, you're really hitting at a very strong strand of the Tory Party. And it connects to an article in The Spectator I read by Lionel Shriver, in which he said, she was congratulating Ken Badenoch and says, the Tories need to become the nasty party again. So she laid out all these things they were going to do. They were going to throw out net zero, they were going to be much more brutal on immigration, they were going to be,

• 40:36Rory Stewart?

  you know, much more brutal on welfare and all this. But her basic line was, the Conservative Party needs to become much more nasty. I, I think this is mad. I mean, even, you know, think of the impact that Margaret Thatcher had on people, the sense that a lot of Andy Burnham's political life is defined by his hatred and despair of what Thatcher has represented. But Margaret Thatcher was balanced by a lot of people, you know, Peter Walker, Willie Whitelaw, Carrington, a huge range of people. And then ultimately, Chris Patton, William Waldegrave, who represented another side of the Conservative Party. Ken Clark would be another one, right?

• 41:20Rory Stewart?

  That the only possibility of the Tory Party doing the tough stuff that it wants to do on tax and business is that there's some sense of conscience, some sense of compassion, some sense of care, to actually set out to be the nasty party seems to be catastrophic, no? Or am I, am I missing the politics here?

• 41:37Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think to, actually to say we need to be nastier is, doesn't strike me as a very sensible strategy. And we should say, just for the historical record, Maggie did have quite a few ideological purges of the wets from time to time, once she'd worked out exactly where she wanted to go.

• 41:53Rory Stewart?

  But she never fired any of them from the Tory Party, never would have considered firing them from the Tory Party.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  No, she fired from the Cabinet, but she didn't kick people out of the Tory Party, that's true, that's true. Rory, food security and farming, James wants to know, will Andy Burnham's government do more or less to address the climate crisis? Hope so. Including our food security, hope so. I've got to replug Caroline Lucas' mini-series that she's doing for us on the climate crisis. Part two is about food security and it's, it's pretty terrifying. I think this is, the guy sitting next to me on the plane from Reykjavik is absolutely right. He just said, why are the political leaders, why have they all gone quiet on the climate crisis? Years, a few years ago, we were all talking about it. Now things are getting worse, but we're not talking about it. And so what Caroline's series, she's interviewing, as she's

• 42:39Alastair Campbell?

  done through the whole thing, somebody who really knows about this issue of food security, who says there's a realistic possibility, decline of forests, glacier-fed rivers is going to lead to global competition for food, code for, we're going to have wars over who's got the food, beginning in the 2030s. And when you look at our country, we are so far behind. I was in Finland, I remember when I was in Finland recently, talking to President Stu, and he was telling me just how self-sufficient they are in a crisis, both on energy and on food. So for food, if they were suddenly in trouble tomorrow, they've got nine, eight, eight and a half to nine months, they're, they're fine. We're between, just in time and all that, three days and three weeks, if something really bad happens.

• 43:24Rory Stewart?

  And actually, to be honest on that one, let me just come in on that, because your Finland point's really good. The honest answer is, we don't have any strategic food reserves of any sort in Britain. I mean, that figure that we've got three, five days, a couple of weeks, that's not that the government has strategic food reserves. Finland literally has strategic food reserves, in the way that China has strategic oil reserves. And it's something the British government could choose to do, and it's something that so many countries and governments have done in history, which is to say, we need to have, standing by, you know, silos, full of grain, effectively.

• 43:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. So, first episode out last week, second episode Friday, you can get it at therestispolitics.com. And it's Caroline talking to Professor Paul Behrens, who specialises in exactly this issue, food security.

• 44:11Rory Stewart?

  Here's a thing, I mean, it's a bit late maybe for Andy Burnham, but the, but maybe not too late at a non-Cabinet level. One of the things that happens in Finland is they have an agency tasked exactly with this question of food security. And it brings together all the different bits. The problem at the moment, Angela Eagle's just taken over in Defra, but she doesn't have all the levers around this stuff. I mean, because food security is not just about producing more food, we could produce more food in Britain. One of the things that's happened is that we've gone from about 11 million acres under production to about nine million acres under production, because quite a lot of land has been set aside. Some land, a minority of it, has been rewilded, a lot of land has been planted under trees.

• 44:55Rory Stewart?

  So a deliberate choice has been made in Britain not to plant crops where we planted crops. During the Second World War, there were millions more acres under cultivation. It wasn't just people putting potatoes in their backyard, all the felsides were planted. So we could be producing more, but it's not just about production, it's about resilience, it's about how we think about water management. You know, the sun is very good for growing crops, but it's absolutely no good if you have these water shortages that we keep having. And then there's the whole issue around distribution, packaging, global supply chains, all this stuff we saw around Covid. So let's imagine wildfires in Canada, which are unbelievable. I was just in Cape Cod in the US, just got back. The whole sky in Massachusetts was black.

• 45:36Rory Stewart?

  The, the sun at four in the afternoon was a tiny red speck, because all this smoke was coming over from Canada. Unbelievable. And you looked at a map, there were wildfires right away from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast.

• 45:49Alastair Campbell?

  Wasn't Donald Trump saying he was going to put tariffs on Canada unless they could stop the smoke coming in?

• 45:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, that was particularly mad, mad Trump.

• 45:57Alastair Campbell?

  Close to home for both of us, fires, the Cairngorms in the north of Scotland. I mean, back to my point, when are we going to wake up?

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  Arthur's Seat is up in flames, and it's going to take the fire brigades days to get grips of that right, right on the edge of Edinburgh. But if you put together, let's imagine there were wildfires in Canada, let's imagine there was a drought in Brazil, let's imagine India imposed rice export bans, there's a war in Ukraine, then you suddenly see where the problems come from. Because why we're likely to end up in a food security crisis is multiple crises overlapping. And it's very difficult for Defra to think about this on their own. So if we're serious about this, firstly, listen to Caroline Lucas's report, but secondly, think about what machinery of government we need to put in place to deal with this.

• 46:45Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, it's quite, it's been quite heavy.

• 46:47Rory Stewart?

  I want to get you, if you can bear, on to the question of the World Cup and some football. And we haven't had proper, proper questions from this. So this is a question from Derek, which is, Alistair, being honest in yourself, what did you learn about the world and football? What surprised you? What was interesting for you? And if you were trying to convince someone who wasn't a football fan, why it was something worth watching, what did you learn about humanity and the world?

• 47:13Alastair Campbell?

  Cue plug, The New World, who've done this wonderful photo spread of fans from all 64 countries, face painted. I think the, I think the World Cup was a, was a gigantic success on many levels, despite who leads America and despite who leads FIFA. I learned, as if I didn't know, that Donald Trump is a total narcissist. And I was, I know it's pathetic and childish and petulant, but this is what happens when you've got Trump derangement syndrome. I was watching in this pub in Iceland, when the crowd booed Donald Trump, the crowd in the pub cheered the crowd in the stadium. I learnt that, I was in, when I was at the

• 47:57Alastair Campbell?

  Champions League final, I met this guy, Karanka, who used to be a manager of Middlesbrough, top footballer. And I said, come on, you guys know what's going on, who's going to win the World Cup? He said, well, it's pretty easy to work out, it's going to be Spain, France, England or Argentina. They were, they were the last four. And he thought Spain, he thought Spain, and Spain won it.

• 48:13Rory Stewart?

  What stage did he guess the last four?

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, this was before the tournament started.

• 48:17Rory Stewart?

  Oh my gosh. So he manages, wow, wow, wow, wow.

• 48:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other thing I learned is that, even though it lasted a long time, if you love football, you can cope. You, you could, you could cope with several, you could cope with several, several games. I also think that, I think it underlined, if you talk to the people who were there and you listen to people there, there are two Americas, two very different Americas. There's the Trump America that we all hear about, and it's, it's just noise and it's performative politics. And people, most of the fans from most parts of the world said they had a kind of amazing time and they had really good receptions everywhere they, they went.

• 48:59Rory Stewart?

  I was in Boston, and they were so funny in Boston, so pleased about Scottish fans, so pleased about the fact that the Scots have managed to drink out all the beer in Boston. I mean, I heard this from so many people in Boston, we had no beer left, they drunk us totally dry.

• 49:14Alastair Campbell?

  That's proof that the market economy doesn't work. That's why you need socialism, Rory, you need socialist approach to beer.

• 49:19Rory Stewart?

  I had a question for you from Stocky, my father-in-law. So he, you know, is a big, big, loves playing sport, loves watching sport, but played American football, watched American football. But he was a bit bewildered by watching what he calls soccer. He loyally sat through all the games of this, but he said, can you get Alistair to explain to me, and many, many, many other Americans, where are the plays, what they're used to in American football, is these very, very complex, 95 different plays that have been set up, where the quarterback gets ready, one person sets an instruction, another person sets an instruction. And he was looking at soccer, and as a new soccer watcher, without knowing much about it, he found it a bit boring compared to American football, because he wasn't able

• 50:04Rory Stewart?

  to spot 97 detailed, choreographed, in advance plays. Are you able to explain this to the American viewer?

• 50:13Alastair Campbell?

  First of all, I would say to Stocky, that is why I find NFL so boring. Is because it's relentlessly stop-start. It is rehearsed, pre-programmed almost. The great thing about, so football managers set up with systems. So you can see roughly what the system is that they're playing. And then as the game evolves, they adapt tactics and systems. And the joy of watching football, particularly if you're with somebody who knows about football. I've had the pleasure of watching football with some great managers. They see a different game. They see it like an NFL guy might see an NFL game if they worked in it their whole lives. I'd also think, I thought what you were going to say, because the main criticism you get from

• 50:58Alastair Campbell?

  Americans is that it's such a low-scoring game, unless it's England against France for the bronze medal. But the reason that it's low-scoring is because when two good teams are playing each other, it is really, really hard to score against each other. That's the, so that's why it needs these really special players. They talk about unlocking defences because they're looking for gaps and they're looking for, they're looking for their players understanding what they might do with the ball. So look, Stocking needs to come to, I'd say, let's say Burnley against Wrexham next year. We can sit down, we can watch it and I can try to explain. But it's way more exciting than any American sport. I'll tell you the other thing I learned, the other thing I learned, because I didn't go.

• 51:42Alastair Campbell?

  I'm deep down, I'm, I think I'm glad I didn't go. I think I'm glad I didn't go, but I did miss the Scotland experience. But it meant I watched a lot of pundits. You asked what surprised me, I'll tell you what surprised me is how good a pundit Wayne Rooney is. Because Wayne Rooney, reputation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he had the best line of all, because the other thing that I loathed about the World Cup was that the monification, the celebification. I mean, the final, if they, they just kept scanning the crowd for kind of, you know, celebrities, some of whom I recognised, some of whom I didn't. And the half-time show, I just thought Wayne Rooney spoke for the world when Gabby Logan said, what do you think of it?

• 52:27Alastair Campbell?

  And he said, well, I was glad when it was ended, I thought it was crap. That is, so keep all that American, this is bad for Stocky, keep that American shit out of it.

• 52:35Rory Stewart?

  I, I was incredibly impressed. I was watching, obviously, the only way of watching in the States is watching the dreaded Fox. But Thierry Henry, I thought was incredible on explaining Spanish plays. I mean, so fluent and such a wonderful, I mean, I thought he was incredible. Does he do a lot on British Italian too?

• 52:53Alastair Campbell?

  He does a fair bit, yeah.

• 52:54Rory Stewart?

  He was so good at both getting the overall picture and also giving us the detailed plays.

• 52:59Alastair Campbell?

  Was Zlatan Ibrahimovic on as well?

• 53:02Rory Stewart?

  He was, yeah, Zlatan was up next to him, yeah.

• 53:04Alastair Campbell?

  And what do you think, because he's my teammate in Croatia.

• 53:07Rory Stewart?

  Is he, is he, well, he, he was, I mean, he didn't, he wasn't quite as fluent as Thierry Henry. Just finally on that one, finally on that one, will you just, sorry, this is so boring, but funny. Can you just give us a bit on our German manager and what the hell went wrong? Is there anything interesting to be said on that? Or has it all been said on how we managed to lose the semi-final?

• 53:26Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's all been said. And now Fiona, as you know, isn't a big football fan, doesn't understand why I've devoted so much of my life to travelling up and down the not very reliable train land to go and see Burnley. But she did watch the England Argentina game with me and she now thinks she should be the England manager. Because as the substitutions, as the substitutions were being made, she said, why does, why is he taking off attackers to put on defenders? Why don't they want to score another goal? Look, I think he, I think he fought the last war. They did something similar against Mexico, but that was with 10 men, very different. And they did something similar with Norway and he thought it's worked before.

• 54:10Alastair Campbell?

  But this is the difference. Messi had been very, very quiet for most of the game. He suddenly realised they are going, they're pushing themselves back. This is where I'm going to go and open them up and he did it. So no, I don't think it's more complicated than that. That being said, I thought this is what's wrong with our fandom and our media. Tuchel has done a pretty good job for England and he doesn't go from hero to zero just because of one bad period really. But the truth is, the best, the best team in the world is France, but the best team in the tournament overall won the tournament. My big worry watching in Iceland was that Argentina, who didn't have a single shot in 90 minutes, were going to get one shot in the 97th minute and win it.

• 54:51Alastair Campbell?

  But no, justice, justice was done and so happy for the Spaniards. So happy for the Palestinians who support Spain because of their stance on. Oh, and by the way, Rory, just on that, did you see the story about the guy who devoted himself to erecting huge screens in Gaza so as that people could watch the World Cup? He was killed by an Israeli attack.

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I'm sorry, sorry to hear that, sorry to hear that. Okay, well, let, let, let me try to bring us to an end on a slightly happier note. So we've, we've done some pretty tough stuff. We've done China and AI, these amazing new Chinese models. The latest, most advanced model, Kimi K3, most of you are not going to be able to download. So don't rush to your phone. In fact, it's one of the limitations to model, almost certainly because they don't have the compute behind it. They're not able to take many more subscribers at the moment. But we've done China and AI, soft power. We've done quite a lot on, on food security, done quite a lot on the Tory party, director Tory party, done a little bit on football. I just want to finish though, maybe with football and you for a second.

• 55:57Rory Stewart?

  Bring us back to Andy Burnham, our new prime minister, who like you, his two great loves in life seem to be football and music. And in particular, the Manchester music scene talks a lot in his book. It's a lovely book and thank you for making me read it. That's Smiths, Morrissey, UB40, Manchester club scene and how important that was to him. And a lot of his time at Cambridge was playing football and going to concerts. Quite European, I mean, he's married a lady who is, I think, a Dutch-speaking woman who was living in Belgium.

• 56:27Alastair Campbell?

  She's a Dutch Belgian called Marie Frans.

• 56:32Rory Stewart?

  So, and, and we're all getting a bit excited about that. And also he's an English graduate, whereas Keir Starmer famously wasn't able to name his favourite book and seemed to slightly struggle to communicate his kind of cultural interests. Andy Burnham seems very comfortable with that. So tell us a little bit just to finish about, you know, music, football, what that tells us about Andy Burnham.

• 56:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, the first thing to say, I think it's real, it's authentic. And I think the football thing is very, very deep. I mean, he really, really, really loves Everton Football Club. He's also a rugby league fan like I am. No, it goes deep and also he's, he's, he's not a bad footballer.

• 57:03Rory Stewart?

  He's got a lovely story about playing with Mike Atherton at Cambridge, about how useless this famous crooked was at playing football.

• 57:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, he was, he was a bit, he was a bit disparaging of Mike Atherton's footballing skills. But no, he's a good, he's a good sort of midfield general, quite physical. Will go into a, won't back out of a tackle. I was thrilled to see that Peter Reid, former, Peter Reid, who's probably most famous, he listens to the podcast, Rory, I'm going to say this, he's most famous for being one of the many, many players that marred on a beat as he went to the other goal in the Hand of God goal game. And I've always said to him, Peter, just stay there, just don't wobble, just stop wobbling from side to side. But I was great to see, it was great to see Peter Reid in the, in Downing Street with his white jacket on,

• 57:52Alastair Campbell?

  with Steve Rotherham bottled feeding his grand, his grandchild. Now, the football thing is real and I think that speaks as well to his kind of absolute belief in local community. The sport thing is real. I, I think a lot of sports people have been in touch with me. I was at the Diamond League Athletics on Saturday with Sepp Coe and Brendan Foster, both of whom have had dealings with Andy through the work that they do. And, and both really, really positive about him in terms of sport. The, the UK Athletics people who are there are really positive. They know that he really gets sport. And it was great as well, Rory, to see you've got a Scottish tortoise there.

• 58:33Alastair Campbell?

  Josh Kerr, your fellow Scot, setting a new world mile record. So that was, that was a good day.

• 58:40Rory Stewart?

  Unbelievable, the speed. I mean, somebody pointed out that over a mile, he's travelling at a speed that most of us would struggle to achieve over 100 metres.

• 58:47Alastair Campbell?

  Most of us would struggle to go at anything close to that pace for, for a yard. It was fabulous to watch, it was fabulous to watch. So no, I think the sport thing is important and it'd be interesting to see how, you know, Keir Starmer, who was an Arsenal season ticket holder and the security wouldn't let him go where he used to sit, had to go.

• 59:07Speaker 05

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalises your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC. Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig.

• 59:25Speaker 06

  On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 59:38Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 59:43Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 59:46Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 59:47Speaker 06

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 59:53Speaker 08

  Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended blinds.com.

• 1:00:00Speaker 09

  With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space and budget, customers who shop at blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night's sleep and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Visit blinds.com to order your free samples today.

• 1:00:22Alastair Campbell?

  In the box and all that. Be interesting to see whether Andy does all that stuff or whether he tries to stay in his usual seat.

• 1:00:28Rory Stewart?

  He claims he's been guaranteed that he can sit in his normal seat for the Everton game. So we'll, we'll see what that happens.

• 1:00:34Alastair Campbell?

  That might end up pissing off other fans who suddenly have to have their legs sniffed as they walk in.

• 1:00:40Rory Stewart?

  Lots of things will piss off fans. Right, thank you, Alison, very much. Look forward to seeing you again very soon.

• 1:00:45Alastair Campbell?

  As Rory, it's just so heartening that you wanted to talk about football, don't be. I was going to try and get through a whole episode without talking about Trump. I know I'd already failed, but anyway, we, we didn't make it. See you soon.

• 1:00:57Rory Stewart?

  See you soon, bye bye.

• 1:01:06Rory Stewart?

  Hello, everybody. We've got some exciting news to share with you.

• 1:01:09Alastair Campbell?

  We do indeed. As you all know, the Rest is Politics plus members get early access to Question Time. They get ad-free listening, they get exclusive series and a host of other benefits.

• 1:01:18Rory Stewart?

  And probably for me, the most exciting thing is these exclusive mini-series we're doing. And right now we're holding a summer sale. So you can get an extra 20% off on an annual membership from now until the end of August.

• 1:01:29Alastair Campbell?

  If that sounds good, head to therestispolitics.com and use the code SUMMER26 when you purchase an annual plan.

• 1:01:36Rory Stewart?

  Make the most of this deal and join us for a busy summer ahead. We've got some brilliant new series coming your way. So new stuff coming, for example, on existential threats. And then there's all the stuff, Alison, and what are some of the mini-series that you've enjoyed? Do you think people should be listening to?

• 1:01:50Alastair Campbell?

  I've enjoyed them all, to be honest. I really liked the Gen Z series that Vicky Spratt did. I've enjoyed the, the recent one on the funding of reform.

• 1:01:59Rory Stewart?

  I've been very proud of some of the stuff we've been doing on AI. We now have a really good package for listeners going deep into AI around the world. So sign up now and start catching up with our special SUMMER26 code purchase on therestispolitics.com.